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Subject: Re: Design patterns as a weapon
Date: 1999/11/29
Message-ID: <3152894135590750@naggum.no>#1/1
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
* Michael Schuerig
| The most important thing about a pattern is that it gives you guidance
| when to apply it. A language feature does not do that.
this whole argument is getting rather bizarre in my view. it seems that
you attribute to these "patterns" the entire culture of good programming
practice, and refuse to acknowledge that good programming practice can
even exist without patterns. it's like the joke about Freudians: if you
deny having an Oedipus complex, you're even worse off, because then you
suffer from _suppressing_ your Oedipus complex. however, nobody here
appears to be denying the value of patterns, just the exclusionary point
that everything else that has value must also be patterns, and that if it
isn't a pattern, then it lacks goodness in some fundamental sense. in
this particular case, consider a textbook and a community of programmers
who tell their students and new members how to use a langauge feature.
some would say "ah! pattern! I knew it!" while others will argue that
_teaching_ and _apprenticeship_ are hardly worth patternizing since they
are already well-established processes and concepts.
I think it's worth our while to identify certain commonalities in what
good programmers do when they write good software, but there is a very
real danger in making everything explicit and spending time talking about
it: we lose track of its proportions and relevance, and the more we talk
about one thing to the exclusion of other things, the more we try to tie
that thing into everything else through the most dubious of connections
that would be seen as obviously wrong to anyone who had not focused so
heavily on that particular thing. this is why it's vital to a healthy
mind constantly to seek and examine information that runs counter to its
established ideas and concepts. only that way can a person maintain the
crucial psychological belief that what one does believe is superior to
what one does not or no longer believe. the alternative is fanaticism.
#:Erik